Recently, seventeen departments including the Ministry of Education jointly issued the “Special Action Plan for Comprehensively Strengthening and Improving Students’ Mental Health Work in the New Era (2023-2025)”, specifying the proportion of schools equipped with full-time (part-time) mental health education teachers by 2025  reached 95%, and the proportion of family education guidance service sites that carry out mental health education reached 60%.
The “Action Plan” deploys and carries out eight key tasks: promote mental health by promoting five educations simultaneously, adhere to the unification of learning knowledge and improving overall quality, and cultivate socialist builders and successors with all-round development of morality, intelligence, physique, art and labor.  Strengthen mental health education, set up relevant mental health courses, give full play to the role of classroom teaching, pay attention to individual differences of students, and help students master mental health knowledge and skills.  Standardize mental health monitoring, adhere to prevention first, move the gate forward, and regularly carry out mental health assessments for students.  Improve psychological early warning intervention, improve the early warning system, strengthen the construction of physical defense and technical defense, early detection of serious mental health problems of students, smooth channels for preventive referral and intervention, and timely referral, diagnosis, and treatment.  Build a strong psychological talent team, improve the quality of talent training, equip mental health teachers, and smooth the development channels for teachers.

At the same time, the plan will also support mental health research, carry out basic, cutting-edge and international research on students’ mental health, and promote the application of results.  Optimize social psychological services, improve social psychological service capabilities, strengthen family education guidance services, and strengthen the protection of minors.  Create a healthy growth environment, extensively carry out popularization of students’ mental health knowledge and prevention of psychological problems, promote students’ mental health work experience and practices, and strengthen daily supervision and management.
The “Action Plan” stated that various safeguards will be improved.  Strengthen organizational leadership, incorporate student mental health work into the evaluation of the performance of educational responsibilities by provincial people’s governments, into the overall plan for school reform and development, into the talent training system and supervision and evaluation index system, and serve as an evaluation and leadership team for schools at all levels and types  Important content of the annual assessment.  Implement funding, increase overall planning, optimize the expenditure structure, and effectively strengthen the funding guarantee for students’ mental health work.  Cultivate and promote experience, support qualified regions and schools to innovate students’ mental health work models, and play a leading and leading role.

Source: Beijing Daily